axes, impaling or decapitating their victims. They laid the corpses
in the palace's cistern. Roughly 30 feet long and 10 feet deep, it was
lined with red stucco and fed by an underground spring. The bodies,
accompanied by ceremonial garments and precious ornaments, fit
easily. Kan Maax and his queen were not spared. They were buried
a hundred yards away in two feet of construction fill intended
for remodeling the palace. The king still wore his elaborate cere
monial headdress and a mother-of-pearl necklace identifying him
as Holy Lord of Cancuen.
No one knows who the killers were or what they sought. Booty
apparently did not interest them. Some 3,600 pieces of jade, includ
ing several jade boulders, were left untouched; household goods in
the palace and ceramics in Cancuen's giant kitchen were undisturbed.
But to archaeologists who have dug up the evidence over the past
several years, the invaders' message is clear. By depositing the bodies
in the cistern, "they poisoned the well," says Vanderbilt University
archaeologist Arthur Demarest. They also chipped the faces from
all the carved likenesses on Cancuen's stone monuments and pushed
them over, facedown. "The site," says Demarest, "was ritually killed."
Cancuen was one of the last major dominoes to fall in
the Pasi6n River Valley, part of the ancient Maya heart
land in present-day Guatemala. Many other cities had
already met similarly decisive ends, and throughout
the southern lowlands of Mesoamerica, what came to
be known as the collapse of the Classic Maya was well under way.
The civilization that had dominated the region for 500 years was
sliding into a prolonged, irrevocable decline.
While warfare obliterated some vibrant city-states, others simply
faded. The kuhul ajaw,or holy lords, who had celebrated their every
deed in murals, sculpture, and architecture, no longer commissioned
new works. Public displays of hieroglyphic writing became scarce,
and dates in the Long Count calendar system all but disappeared
from monuments. Population fell drastically. Nobles abandoned
palaces and squatters moved in, lit cook fires in the old throne rooms,
and built lean-tos next to crumbling walls. And then even the squat
ters left, and the jungle reclaimed what remained.
Elsewhere in the Peten lowlands of Guatemala and in southern
Mexico, the collapse took longer. Even as Cancuen fell, rulers of the
great city-state of Tikal in the northern Peten were building cere
monial structures. But 30 years later Tikal's population began to
drop precipitously as well. Its last dated monument was inscribed
in 869. By 1000, the Classic Maya had ceased to exist.
The question has fascinated scholars and the public since 19th
century explorers began discovering "lost cities" in the Peten: How
could one of the ancient world's great civilizations simply dissolve?
Early speculation centered on sudden catastrophe, perhaps
volcanism or an earthquake or a deadly hurricane. Or perhaps
98 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * AUGUST 2007